This is a webinar event.
Speaker: Alexander King, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Iowa State University
Title: What We Have Learned, So Far, About Critical Materials
Abstract: A decade has passed since global manufacturers and policy-makers suddenly became aware that the supplies of certain materials might be at risk. China controlled about 98% of the world’s supply of rare earth elements and there were indications that it was preparing to reduce their availability to the rest of the world.
Responses included stockpiling, trade disputes, and establishing new research efforts aimed at finding ways to reduce the need for rare earths or develop alternate supplies.
After ten years of successes and failures, much has been learned about the ways that emergent supply-chain challenges really get solved and the useful roles that materials research and development can play. In this lecture, we highlight a few of the lessons that have been learned, with a view toward mounting more effective approaches in the future.
Bio: Alex King is a Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at Iowa State University. He was the founding Director of the US Department of Energy’s Critical Materials Institute, headquartered at the Ames Lab, and he has previously served as the Director of DOE’s Ames Laboratory, Head of the School of Materials Engineering at Purdue, and Vice Provost for Graduate Studies at SUNY Stony Brook. He has a lifetime research interest in crystal lattice defects, but in recent years he has increasingly worked on the interactions of materials supply chains, emerging technologies and economic development.
His book “Critical Materials” was published by Elsevier in October, 2020.
Alex has been the President of MRS, Chair of the University Materials Council of North America, Co-chair of the Gordon Conference on Physical Metallurgy, and Chair of the APS Interest Group on Energy Research and Applications.
He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mining Minerals and Materials; ASM International, the Materials Research Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a Visiting Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 1996 and a US Department of State Jefferson Science Fellow for 2005-06.
Alex was the 2017 ASM & TMS Distinguished Lecturer in Materials & Society and also received the 2019 Acta Materialia Award for Materials & Society.
Seminar Host: Xiaoli Tan
Zoom Link: https://iastate.zoom.us/j/95763046756